It is known in the art to provide access to troubleshooting information regarding computer software via information published on a computer network, an example of such a network being the world-wide packet-switched network commonly referred to as the Internet. Various software-producing companies provide web pages on web sites, i.e., hypertext markup language (HTML) based files, for access by users attempting to identify and correct a problem with software produced by the company or additional software, e.g., third party software, interacting with company-produced software.
Currently, software-producing companies use various manual and semi-automated mechanisms for delivering software support assistance to their users. Company software support engineers assist users via telephone, through on-site engagements, or through the use of remote collaboration software enabling a support engineer to take control of the user's computing environment temporarily or guide the user through a set of actions needing to be taken in the user's computing environment for troubleshooting purposes. In all cases, the support engineer typically needs to examine information in the user's environment to troubleshoot a problem and make changes in the user's environment to fix an identified problem. This requires time to be spent by the support engineer and by the user, and this time is costly for both parties.
Attempting to reduce the time required to troubleshoot and repair software problems, many companies host support web sites available to users, as described above. These web sites contain documents about troubleshooting and fixing various problems known to occur with the company's software. Typically, a company support engineer uses an authoring system tool to create troubleshooting documents after encountering a new issue reported by a user. These documents are often referred to as forming a portion of a knowledge base concerning the software produced by the company and specific documents identifying errors, problems, and associated fixes and information documentation are referred to as knowledge base documents. The nature of the fixes includes patches, hot fixes, and commands.
However, if a user encountering a software problem cannot find a useful troubleshooting document on the support website (or does not wish to spend time looking for such a document), the user is likely to call a support engineer for assistance. In this case, the support engineer will often choose to search the knowledge base of troubleshooting documents to see if there are any hints for solving the user issue. After the support engineer determines what needs to be performed, the support engineer initiates a manual or semi-automated process, as described above. In a more advanced case, the support engineer creates an executable software application, referred to as an agent, configures the agent with the appropriate knowledge for the troubleshooting task, and transmits the agent to the user. This type of user interaction enhances the user experience and contributes to building a pool of reusable solutions.
Unfortunately, the knowledge on how to fix such issues reported in the past and captured in troubleshooting documents is not utilized efficiently. An embodiment according to the present invention, as disclosed below, proposes how the knowledge can be automatically leveraged, and how the same knowledge can be used to provide direct remote support assistance for the user.
To the inventors' knowledge, there are no automated solutions for leveraging troubleshooting document knowledge as described in the present invention disclosure. Currently used manual and semi-automated solutions have been described above.